Virtual Reality
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My best attempt to describe this technical, industrial museum is as a Mecca for Makers. It's not a funky new space with a bunch of hipsters manning 3D printers – not that I have a problem with such spaces… I love those spaces 🙂 – rather it's a shrine to all manner of human invention and creation since before the industrial revolution. The first thing I had to see on entering the museum, this morning, was Foucault's Pendulum – with the museum playing a key part in Umberto Eco's incredible novel of the same name, this was a "must see"…
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Birdly is an immersive Virtual Reality experience that let's you fly like a bird through virtual cityscapes. To get a sense for how it works, check out this video: Birdly - Splitscreen from maxR on Vimeo I first heard about Birdly from Brian Kling, a friend and colleague in our Neuchâtel office who tried it out earlier this year at the Lift conference in Geneva. He came back really excited about the exhibit, and his excitement was contagious. Since then I've been looking for an opportunity to experience it firsthand. I'm happy to say the opportunity finally presented…
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It's insane how the years tick past. Today marks the 9th anniversary of Through the Interface. For a bit of fun, I've added an Easter Egg (well, actually it's more like a Birthday Cake) to Vrok.it: Choose the "Cake" button on the left to view a Birthday Cake modelled completely using AutoCAD. If you connect to the session using the QR code, you can see the birthday cake in stereoscopic 3D on your smartphone using Google Cardboard. Or without it, if you're good at squinting. In case you're interested, the mechanics of creating the 3D text in AutoCAD were quite fun:…
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It's live! Our entry for the recent VR Hackathon in San Francisco has received a significant amount of spit and polish (OK, perhaps not the best mental image) over the last couple of weeks and is now ready for prime time (i.e. Beta testing ;-). Check it out at http://vrok.it! It should work well with Chrome, Firefox or Safari, although for best results I'd stick with Chrome on mobile devices. The term "vrok" is one I came up with on the trip back from San Francisco… it's a combination of an invented acronym – Virtual Reality Online Collaboration – and…
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I wanted to post on a more in-depth topic, today, but I've been heads-down working on our project from the recent VR Hackathon, getting ready to push it live. We've made really good progress over the last few days, especially considering it's only a part-time project for Lars, Oleg and myself. We've implemented per-session support and a number of other important features (Lars has also spent some serious time re-factoring the code – it's certainly more elegant than what I'd usually crank out ;-). The code is all here, in case. Here's a quick audio-less demo, to give you a…
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The 2nd VR Hackathon, which took place in San Francisco over the weekend, was an absolute blast. It was held at Galvanize, a co-working space about a 15-minute walk from our 1 Market Street office. The venue was great: it had plenty of space but also with a fair amount of natural light (very important for those of us getting over our jetlag). There were fewer people at this second event – inevitably, as it happened over the Memorial Day weekend – but there was nonetheless a great energy in the room. At the core of our team – which…
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Yesterday I went along with two fellow Autodeskers, Lars and Oleg, to the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality conference at the San Jose Convention Center. As we were only attending the second day – we all flew in on Monday – we just took passes for the exhibition hall rather than the full conference. People were lining up to get into the exhibition hall as it opened at 11am (it was only open for 4 hours, in total, closing at 3pm). We chose not to join the queue ourselves – we'd bumped into Damon Hernandez and were having too much fun…
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I'm on the train to Zurich airport, where I'll hop on the direct flight to San Francisco. This evening I'm staying in San Jose, as tomorrow I'll be visiting the SVVR 2015 expo hall to do some research on the latest virtual reality technologies in advance of the coming weekend's VR Hackathon (following on from the one in October). This Hackathon is set to be really fun: while last time I ended up mostly talking with people about Autodesk and the View & Data API, demoing the Google Cardboard prototype I put together – which was also fun, especially when…
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A reminder that proposals are open for AU2015 until May 26th. I've just submitted two, myself. Of the three topics I had in mind – relating to VR, AutoCAD I/O and TypeScript – I decided to submit proposals on the first two: I'll do my best to use TypeScript for one or both of the other two (assuming they get accepted) which will at least give people some exposure to how the technology works. And give some good fodder for blog posts, of course. Here are the abstracts I submitted: Virtual Reality viewing of 3D models using Autodesk's View and…
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After the excitement around Magic Leap and HoloLens, on Friday of this week there's another big VR-related tech announcement being made. But wait… isn't CES finished? And Build doesn't happen for a few more months? That's right: this one is being made at the New York Toy Fair. Say whaaat? Mattel has owned the View-Master brand since their acquisition of Tyco Toys in 1997 (who had in turn acquired the brand in 1989). I now have probably twenty or so View-Masters – something I talked about recently – but there's nothing very interesting about the later models, in my opinion.…